The mainstream media have had a very rough few years. So rough, in fact, that we no longer use "mainstream media" as an innocuous phrase to describe conventional professional journalism. The Internet has succeeded in getting the mainstream media capitalized and abbreviated (MSM) in order to be singled out and scolded more easily — like a once-powerful apparatchik of the Chinese politburo forced to wear a dunce cap so that throngs of ideological zealots know whom to scorn and children can spot whom to throw old cabbage at.

That's probably about how Dan Rather feels. He still doesn't understand why he's under the professional equivalent of house arrest. Just last month, Mr. Rather explained that he wants to reopen the Memogate investigation because he finds it "strange" and "mysterious" that people would doubt the veracity of a man like him. "The facts of the story were correct," Mr. Rather insists. "To this day, no one has proven" otherwise. Unfortunately, Mr. Rather explains, the honchos at CBS have forbidden him to reopen the story and find the one-armed man to his Dr. Richard Kimble. (What does Karl Rove have up his sleeve? Indeed.)

But not everybody in the MSM suffers from such Norma Desmond-grade denial. Which is why the press Brahmins were so quick to claim redemption in the bacteria-frapped waters of post-Katrina New Orleans. The self-congratulatory message just days after the storm was unmistakable: Katrina had changed everything, and the MSM was born again.

Suddenly the sins of Memogate, Eason Jordan (who admitted to soft-pedaling the evils of Saddam's Iraq in order to guarantee "access" to CNN), USA Today's Jack Kelley (made stuff up), Jayson Blair (really, really made stuff up), Howell Raines (didn't care that Blair made stuff up), and the rest were all forgotten. So was the American press's agonized, Jesuitical debate over whether it is compatible with journalistic objectivity to wear a tiny American flag on your lapel. Gone down the memory hole were the accusations about October Surprises, Dowdisms and the like. That was all so antediluvian.

In one collective voice, the MSM proclaimed Katrina its finest hour. ABC News has "not stinted to cover the immediate disaster, and we will not stint on resources to cover the post-disaster," promised executive Paul Slavin. "There is no question that the way [the media] have been perceived by the American people has been at a low ebb," admitted temporary CBS anchor John Roberts. "But the last twelve days have been a time when I've been proud to be in this profession. I think we reconfirmed our status as the voice of the people who have no voice. Everyone I ran into was so thankful that we were there." Christiane Amanpour explained, "I think what's interesting is that it took a Katrina, you know, to bring us back to where we belong. In other words, real journalists, real journalism, and I think that's a good thing." A professor of communications at Fordham University assured the Canadian press that Hurricane Katrina "has reawakened the sleeping giant, and I believe we'll now see a return to the Watergate era of hard-hitting reporting in the United States."

Dan Rather himself effused to Larry King: "I do want to say that I think the coverage of Hurricane Katrina right across the board — CNN led by Anderson Cooper stands out particularly — but everybody across the board did such a good job." The coverage of Katrina was one of the "quintessential great moments in television news … right there with the Nixon-Kennedy debates, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate coverage, you name it."

That statement reveals the first of several problems with the media's attempt to find baptismal redemption in Big Easy sludge. Mr. Rather's idea of what made the press great in the past is among the things that qualify him for his dunce cap. The Nixon-Kennedy debates remain the most enduring example of television's preference for style over substance: Mr. Nixon lost the debate because he had a five o'clock shadow while Mr. Kennedy looked like he could be, well, a news anchor. The Kennedy assassination was truly a profound moment in American history, and was second only to Mr. Rather's fetish for hurricanes in boosting the young newsman's career. But, as Philip Chalk reported in The Weekly Standard last March, Mr. Rather got himself noticed by network brass by broadcasting a story he knew to be false about an elementary-school class's supposedly cheering at the news Kennedy had been killed. The lie had been peddled to him by a liberal activist eager to disparage conservative Dallas as "the city of hate." And, yes, Watergate involved a lot of serious and worthwhile journalism, but even here the motivation was surely equal parts dedicated journalism and hatred of Mr. Nixon.

But that's how good journalism was always defined at CBS and other temples of the MSM. Just one example from a very thick file: Mr. Rather's old CBS colleague Daniel Schorr asserted on air that Barry Goldwater's pre-convention vacation in Germany was clear evidence that the Republican senator was determined to "link up" with neo-Nazi elements, and his meeting with the commanding general of the American Seventh Army — which happened to have a recreation area at Berchtesgaden — was a sign that the Arizonan would be launching his campaign in what was "once Hitler's stamping ground." The second problem with the post-Katrina redemption narrative is that coverage of the hurricane was indisputably partisan. Almost from the outset, the Bush administration was blamed for nearly the entire debacle. FEMA director Michael Brown, although far from faultless, was painted by vengeful media as singularly inept and unqualified, a remarkably unfair charge given New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco's pas de deux of incompetence. The New York Times' ombudsman practically had to use the jaws of life to pry an admission from the paper that Mr. Brown was not former FEMA head Joe Allbaugh's college roommate. More broadly, the Katrina-has-changed-everything chorus sought to use the disaster to prove that all of the liberal nostrums about race and poverty had finally been verified.

The third problem is that not only were such nostrums not verified, but neither were the underlying reported "facts" that much of the coverage hinged on. Yes, New Orleans was flooded. Yes, people died.

But nearly all of the reports of rape and murder that gave the story its most poignant drama and sense of worsening calamity were simply not true. The New Orleans Times-Picayune, to its everlasting credit, chased down the stories of rape gangs and bodies stacked like cordwood and found that they were false rumors. There was not one confirmed murder in the Superdome. Not one. Keep in mind, most of these stories came out of places the media had access to. The Superdome and convention center were within the New Orleans "green zone," as it were. Yet the press — including Fox News's Shepherd Smith — reported unconfirmed stories of murders as though they were fact. Armies of outraged anchors simply took the word of local and state Democratic politicians who were recycling newly minted urban legends. CBS had 200 staffers covering the New Orleans story, and the other networks committed similar resources — and yet they consistently got the most sensational aspects of the story wrong.

And, one must concede, so did many conservatives, including yours truly. For reasons good and bad, many of us simply assumed that local politicians were telling the truth, and that the journalists on the scene had done due diligence to get right what they called one of the biggest stories of the century. It is an interesting question why so many of us were willing to believe that the same media that had beatified Cindy Sheehan would, on a dime, do their job fairly and accurately in New Orleans. The answer probably has something to do with the banality of hurricane reporting in general and the power of sensational claims in particular: How could the press report that babies are being raped in the Superdome if it wasn't true?

Just as easily, it turns out, as it could report that a dimwitted, rabidly anti-American radical willing to wave her own son's bloody shirt was simply a bereaved mom who wanted to ask the president a few questions. Just as easily as it could report that Mr. Goldwater was a crypto-storm trooper. Just as easily it could proclaim that George H.W. Bush had never seen a supermarket scanner. Just as easily as it could swear the Baghdad museum was looted. Just as easily, just as easily, just as easily …

Jack Cafferty, Anderson Cooper, Shepard Smith, and many others took to the airwaves night after night, day after day, denouncing the federal response. "How is it possible that we're getting better intel than you're getting?" CNN's Soledad O'Brien demanded to know of Michael Brown. His answer should have been: "You're not."

Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online. He is speaking tonight on Hurricane Katrina and the mainstream media at 7:00 p.m. in 1100 Grainger Hall. The public is welcome to attend.